The gold rush briefly made Skagway the largest city in Alaska, with a population
that fluctuated between 10,000 and 20,000. Its main street, which some wag had
dubbed "Broadway," was a mud rut bordered by campsites, blacksmiths shops and
fly-by-night restaurants. There were as many as 80 local saloons where a
cheechako (Alaska newcomer) could gargle down strong spirits before
embarking for Dawson. Among the sidewalk throngs were bogus preachers, circus
performers, and even a trained dancing bear named Alexis. Scarcely less visible
were cardsharps and harlots, grifters and gunmen—a contingent that gave Skagway
a distinctly anarchical repute. One observer groused that Skagway was "little
better than hell on earth." No wonder everyone who came to Skagway back then
seemed merely to be passing through. As quickly as they could.
Even now, Skagway hosts far more transients than residents. At last count, only
about 700 people lived here year-round. Yet from late spring through early fall
(the usual Alaskan tourist months), up to five cruise ships a day dock at
Skagway, disgorging 8,000 or so travelers to flood the vintage business
buildings along Broadway, sample beers at the raucous Red Onion Saloon (once a
prominent bordello), and point their video cameras in wonder at the Arctic
Brotherhood Hall, its quirky 1899 facade decorated with 10,000 pieces of
driftwood.
Skagway has found its future as a relic of the past. After 1899, when the
Klondike stampede cooled, the town lapsed into a quieter role as a shipping port
for the Yukon Territory. With little in the way of community development funds,
it left its turn-of-the-century public architecture standing. Over the last two
decades, the U.S. National Park Service has spent more than $11 million
restoring Skagway to the way it looked in the 1890s, when honky-tonk and
gunshots were the common music of its streets.
Furthering the illusion that time has failed to pass here are the men and women
who on any given summer morning can be spotted marching down Broadway on their
way over the Coast Mountains, just as their great-grandfathers might have done.
The difference is that in 1897 and '98, gold seekers left Skagway on the White
Pass Trail, a 45-mile course of switchbacks and deep mud holes that proved
perilous to overburdened pack horses (thus inspiring its nickname, the Dead
Horse Trail). Parts of that path now lie beneath the narrow-gauge tracks of the
White Pass & Yukon Route railway (completed in 1900), which runs from Skagway to
Fraser, British Columbia, and has become as much a tourist attraction as it is a
means of transport.
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| The Skagway Museum at the Arctic Brotherhood Hall features an
engaging selection of memorabilia and photographs that portray what life was
like here in the 1890s. |
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Hikers who dream today of re-creating the stampeders' pilgrimage instead
follow the Chilkoot Trail, which starts nine miles from Skagway at what used to
be the town of Dyea (since reduced to a memory and some canting cemetery
markers). Some 4,000 trekkers a year continue to use the trail, although they
usually reach its end in three to five days, rather than the months that an
encumbered Klondiker might have taken.
Even without scaling peaks, however, visitors can appreciate Klondike stampede
history. The Skagway Museum at the Arctic Brotherhood Hall features an engaging
selection of memorabilia and photographs that portray what life was like here in
the 1890s. And the Park Service and the Skagway Street Car Company conduct
heritage tours through the two dozen blocks of downtown several times a day.
Crime and licentiousness are always favorite topics for the guides, who at every
opportunity invoke the name of Jefferson Randolph Smith—more familiar as
"Soapy," thanks to his fondness for a confidence game that involved paper money
wrapped around bars of soap. His felonious reign ended when, in the summer of
1898, he tried to crash a meeting of vigilantes opposed to his activities and
wound up exchanging fatal gunshots with Frank Reid, the town surveyor. "Only
three people came to Soapy's funeral, including the teamster hired to haul his
body away," says Steve Hites, president of the Skagway Street Car Company, who
dramatizes for his tour guests the details of the town's most famous gunfight.
"But," Hites adds, "two thousand people showed up to eulogize Reid—it was the
largest funeral Skagway had ever seen." The pair are buried within 100 feet of
one another at the Gold Rush Cemetery, about two miles north of downtown.
Jeff Smith's Parlor, an oyster bar that served as Soapy's headquarters, can
still be seen on Second Avenue, just off Broadway, where it sits dark, cold, and
uncared-for behind a cyclone fence. People talk about refurbishing it, but so
far, it hasn't happened. And maybe that's for the best. There's something oddly
reassuring in the fact that a building which once could have properly been
called the center of hell on earth is closed for repairs.
